SIMON RATTLE, during his Capital of Culture visits, told me that one to watch for the future was Robin Ticciati, still only 26, and the youngest maestro to conduct at La Scala.

Rattle had first encountered Ticciati as a 15-year-old protege already trained as a violinist, pianist and percussionist, and clearly destined for a meteoric rise.

Liverpool’s Philharmonic Society can take some credit for first booking the London-born wunderkind as conductor in 2006, since when he has returned each season.

This week’s engagements (with another varied programme on Sunday, 2.30pm), see Ticciati in fairly laconic mood.

His quite shallow, economic technique belies a skill which most definitely puts brains ahead of baton: a cerebral, although much less swaying, approach comparable with Rattle’s own coaxing rather than commanding rostrum manner.

Like his mentor, Ticciati is a devotee of Wagner, beginning here with the relatively succinct Parsifal Overture, a piece so laid back, that if you were to make a mistake, you’d make it for a very long time.

Such languishing phrasing, combined with big rests, exposes both conductor and players to extra scrutiny on texture – in this case favourably.

There was something of a more combative spirit when American soprano Christine Brewer, making her Liverpool debut, sailed forth like a galleon to dispatch Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.

Ms Brewer’s steel-tipped penetrative tones best suited the beautiful melancholy of the final two episodes – Going To Sleep and In The Glow Of Evening – where her voice, although still resounding, was matched by fittingly vulnerable intonation, as Strauss looks back on life, not in a panic-stricken sense, but with peace and contentment.

The radiance needed to carry harmonies which shift with astounding fluidity, also has to depict a soul who knows that the time for its final journey is at hand.

The orchestra went into an intimate huddle – despite the orchestration featuring no fewer than five horns – for Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony.

This saw Ticciati at his most animated, trying to raise the adequate to the realms of the composer’s elder contemporary, Beethoven.

But not even one of British music’s most precocious talents could find a sense of profundity where there was none.